When you design a ship, you can basically set it's size as you want. This seems to be a possible exploit to me: I can design a powerful ship with a ridiculously small size. Enemies will have a hard time to hit me.

Of course the enemy could also have such a ship.

Anyway, because of this feature I have stopped designing my own battleship, because I consider it unfair.

Um . . . Actualy, changing the apearance of a ship has no effect on how it functions in combat. The game calculates the size of your ship based on it's components. Shields add to your ship's size more than anything else. You can change your ship's apearance all you want, even deleting all the triangles in ship design window, and your ship will still take hits just the same as it normaly would.

Very interesting. This means, that
1.) I can press the shrink button many times, have a very small ship appearing on the screen, but the missiles would hit me, even if they would optically pass me?
2.) I can do the other extreme. Missiles would pass through the outer part of the ship and I would not be hit?
3.) collision is calculated not based on the form of the object but always based on distance to the centre?

actually, size is dependant on mass. most objects have a weight of 1, while the repair bot has 2 and engines have 16, and cargo and passengers u should not be using. also, the in-game ship is scaled according to its size. if u make a normal sized design, it should be relatively close to what the "actual" size of the ship is.